Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 1A, January 7, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

There is no such thing as a best international acting Oscar, but the choice for this year’s Academy Award for best international feature could be decided as a competition between the acting veterans (Javier Bardem, Noomi Rapace, Dan Stevens) and the newcomers (Italian first-timer Filippo Scotti, Kosovar breakthrough Yllka Gashi), whose performances are at the heart of the contenders for the 2022 awards. Many of the more high-concept films in the running this year — including Julia Ducournau’s French horror-thriller Titane, the South Korea action-adventure Escape From Mogadishu and the Hungarian period horror movie Post Mortem — didn’t make the international feature shortlist, leaving a group of 15 that are less defined by the theme or genre of their stories than by the actors who bring them to life. The…

Joe Wright’s Cyrano — from a script by Erica Schmidt based on her 2018 stage musical, an adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac — was lensed in romantic locations in Noto, on the island of Sicily. The city itself, which was rebuilt in the baroque style after a 1963 earthquake, became the primary inspiration for the film’s look and warm color palette, explains production designer Sarah Greenwood — whose six Oscar nominations include her work on Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, Anna Karenina and Darkest Hour. While the original story of Cyrano (played in the film by Peter Dinklage, who is married to Schmidt) and Roxanne (Haley Bennett) actually begins in France in 1640, Greenwood and Wright’s goal for the movie was to portray a more fanciful…

The visual effects team on Sony and Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, directed by Jon Watts and starring Tom Holland as Spidey, had their work cut out for them. Due to the multiverse theme of the film, they were tasked with bringing back memorable VFX-driven villains from the two previous Marc Webb-helmed Spider-Man movies that starred Andrew Garfield and three from Sam Raimi that were fronted by Tobey Maguire, including 2004’s Spider-Man 2, the last superhero movie to win an Oscar in visual effects. That meant the return of such characters as Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock, Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman, Jamie Foxx’s Electro and Rhys Ifans’ Lizard. The VFX team was sensitive to what would be involved in “getting all these villains and heroes back together,…

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO Focus Features For Edgar Wright’s psychological thriller — in which Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) is transported to Soho in the swinging ’60s, where she follows a singer, Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) — the director’s go-to supervising sound editor/designer and rerecording mixer, Julian Slater, aimed to create sounds that might come from 1965. “We desperately wanted the movie to sound like something distinctly and sonically relevant to that time period,” he explains. “We spent a lot of time shunning modern-day plug-ins and effects units. There’s a lot of stuff happening with regard to using pieces of dialogue and sound effects and doing treatments that were done from records — a bit less so movies — of that era.” Another key priority was to convey Ellie’s emotional state. Slater explains…

Compartment No. 6 FINLAND DIRECTOR Juho Kuosmanen TOP AWARDS Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix; Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Awards noms Taking its title from the confined quarters of a second-class sleeping car on a train from Moscow to the Arctic port city of Murmansk, this is a melancholic drama but also one that’s unexpectedly uplifting in its insights into human solitude and connection. As dour as it often seems with its almost perceptible reek of stale booze and cigarette smoke, there’s joy here for patient audiences willing to find it, and to forgo the easy consolations of a more conventional outcome. The film blithely disregards the standard rule book for the kind of road movie in which two strangers with little in common slowly come to understand and respect…

COMING 2 AMERICA Challenges abounded for character makeup prosthetics designer Mike Marino. Not only was he tasked with re-creating Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall’s multiple character looks by makeup pioneer Rick Baker from 1988’s Coming to America, he also had to age them 33 years while contending with far less forgiving modern cameras. Marino says his team watched the original “over and over and over again,” studying “all the patterns of wrinkles that every single character had,” capturing every nuance to age-ify. “It was a blessing that they had to look older, because I don’t think I could ever have gotten them to look like they did back then.” Flashback sequences set in 1988 did require hair department co-head Stacey Morris to turn back the clock on Murphy and Hall.…

Ala Kachuu — Take and Run A young Kyrgyz woman is kidnapped and forced to marry a stranger (a custom called “Ala Kachuu”), then caught between her culture and desire for a life of her choosing. Censor of Dreams Every night, The Censor moderates a man’s dreams, hiding his painful memories. But the man learns what happens when The Censor doesn’t report for duty. The Criminals A young couple is denied a hotel room because they are unmarried. A struggle ensues, symbolizing the lack of control in an authoritarian state. Distances When a mentally ill man boards a subway car, the rest of the passengers avoid him — except for one woman, whose actions try to bridge the distance between them. Les Grandes Claques Christmas Eve, 1983: A family winds…

With Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car this year’s frontrunner for best international feature film, Japan could win its second Academy Award in that category, formerly known as best foreign-language film. Rashomon (1950), Gate of Hell (1953) and Samurai, the Legend of Musashi (1954) received honorary awards before the category’s official introduction in 1956, and Spirited Away won best animated feature in 2003. But Departures was the first. Its win on Feb. 22, 2009, marked a major upset. The favorites that year were Israel’s Waltz With Bashir, a documentary-animation hybrid (not unlike this year’s Flee), and France’s The Class, about a Parisian middle-school teacher. Departures, meanwhile, followed an unemployed cellist who answers what he thinks is a job listing for a travel agency — but turns out to be a mortician…

Jon Bernthal often plays the tough guy. But when he got the script for Warner Bros.’ King Richard, about Richard Williams and his quest to make his daughters Serena and Venus the best tennis players in the world, Bernthal knew he wanted to be a part of it. Bernthal fought hard to play Rick Macci, the legendary tennis coach of the Williams sisters, and came to appreciate Macci’s sincere love for the game and the Williams family, as well as Macci’s coaching method. Bernthal and Macci spoke to THR about their collaboration to accurately portray Macci on the big screen, how Bernthal learned to play tennis for the role and what advice Macci gave Bernthal to get inside his mind. Rick, what was your reaction to hearing that this movie…

According to Amir Jadidi, the star of Asghar Farhadi’s drama A Hero, there’s an expression in Farsi that roughly translates as, “The wealthier, the needier.” This was one of the actor’s initial thoughts when the director first pitched the film’s title character, Rahim, a man seemingly forever dangling over the precipice of disaster, yet with a serene demeanor and expression that masks the chaos he’s straddling. “Sometimes people who don’t have anything still have this impression of satisfaction or acceptance in their gaze, because that’s their attitude to life,” says Jadidi, adding that he immediately identified Rahim as a common figure in Iran. “There’s this tendency in our culture of accepting life as it is, despite its difficulty and bitterness.” The seeds for A Hero had begun germinating in Farhadi’s…

Spanish composer Alberto Iglesias has been working steadily alongside Pedro Almodóvar for more than 25 years. Iglesias’ sweeping, romantic scores have helped capture the outsized intimacy that has become a staple of the filmmaker’s late career offerings, including Oscar-winning films like All About My Mother and Talk to Her. Iglesias still remembers the first time Almodóvar reached out to him to score 1995’s The Flower of My Secret. “I was surprised when he called, but I did see some connection with his world,” says Iglesias. “His cinema struck me as very truthful, and it really ached for music. You could see that he’s a great lover of music. And since his films are so rooted in melodrama, I was able to see that I could do things alongside him that…

Affairs of the Art Working-class Beryl’s love for drawing pales in comparison to her eccentric family members’ obsessions, which range from pickling to taxidermy. Bestia This short examines the inner world of an agent for the Chilean Intelligence Directorate whose daily life reveals a fractured existence under fascist rule. Mum Is Pouring Rain After Jane’s Christmas plans are upended, she unexpectedly meets new friends who help her learn how to understand herself and others. The Musician Writer-director Reza Riahi’s short, now streaming on Paramount+, follows a musician and his love who are painfully separated from each other during the Mongols’ 13th century attack on Persia. Only a Child Under Simone Giampaolo’s artistic direction, 20 animators use a variety of techniques to interpret 12-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki’s 1992 U.N. Summit speech. Step Into the River Two…